Penguin: My test results are in

I said this in one post, move on, get a new site and start all over again, when the penalty expired on your old site 301 redirect it.

Wonder what will happen if I redirect my penalized site to my competitor's site, and start a new one myself...

Read your post op; my problem is this. If what you're saying is true (penalties), why isn't everyone and their mother out trying to do bad seo? For example Im in the debt consolidation niche; so sites like (lowermybills, debtconsolidationcare, bankrate, etc) tend to be in the top positions. Why the hell aren't these sites penalized?

My opinion is this (similar to the BBB and how they work):
You have to pay to get a good position. Maybe these guys spend alot on adwords and in turn, get good positions in return?

The shit makes no sense... Most of the sites that got penalized were good content sites (like mine)

reinie, You should run a test and see how it goes =P.

reinie said:

Wonder what will happen if I redirect my penalized site to my competitor's site, and start a new one myself...

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Anyway, the results from your experiments are pretty daunting jb. What G is doing creates an almost impossible barrier of entry to overcome for small businesses, not just SEOers. G has created a type of doughnut hole where people would either have to maintain shitty sites, or dish out tons of cash to get to the point where their site is considered an "authority". Seemingly, there's just no in between at this point.

However, if PR still matters at this point and is an integral part of G's algorithm, there's nothing we can do other than continue to build links to rank our sites is there? There's nothing we could do about any of our past sites that were affected, but only time will tell us what needs to be done for our new ventures.

This is my problem too, the recovery process and most of the affected sites were not moving positively. But, with newer site that I haven't been optimizing pre-penguin, it easily rise on the SERPs with few off-page, while not modifying on-page.

This made me decide to work less on affected sites and work more on new sites. But, I'm not going to 301 redirect the affected site to the new site, I'll just build one from scratch and rank it. If, the penalty expires on the affected sites, then, that might be the time I want to 301 redirect it to the new site.

The reason why I don't think 301's to your competitor's will work yet that same exact 301 will work against you when you use it on your new site is probably because your content matches the old 301'd site.

Your competitor's are very likely to have very different content from the penalized 301 so when google sees the 301 they will see a humongous mismatch between the 301 cached content and the competitor's site that you are trying to trash.

I bet a lot of people who 301 to themselves have the same content when they transfer, so google knows you're the site owner for both domains. 301's by default, according to the google webmaster tools specifically states that 301's are meant to tell google that you are just changing domain names and to transfer all content and links to the new site.

If you want to harm a competitor you would need a way to get them to take your exact content from the penalized site and then do the 301. Kinda like a trojan horse.

I wouldn't recommend negative seo, it's just faster and easier to start a new site. People should seriously start filing anti-trust complaints against google at the FTC website (google/bing ftc anti-trust form, i 'm not allowed to post urls here yet). If nobody complains then google will keep going down this stupid rampage. They must pay for what they are doing.

Expertpeon said:

*rubs eyes* no... just no...

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What are you saying?

Penguin is a very punitive update. It errs on the side of over punishment, rather than leniency, in order to aggressively combat web spam and reduce the profitability of SEO, possibly in order to compel people to use Adwords to generate traffic instead.

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The only success I've had was by placing an contextual link with my affected sites main keyword well above the fold on the homepage of my main PR5 authority site.

The auth site is 11 years old and the lesser site was just under one, and they have never been linked together in any form before. The auth site maybe has 5 OBL's in total and no other OBL's on the homepage.

It came back.

(Please no PM's about this - It is being tested on someone elses site from here, and I don't need any more test subjects)

assphuck said:

As with most penalties, there really is not squat you can do until they expire. And most algorithmic penalties do expire. The last penalty I had before Penguin lasted about three months. When it expired, my ranks were well above where they were before the penalty. Now that site is in the toilet again.

A good read on Penguin is at http://searchenginewatch.com/articl...egative-SEO-Disavowing-Links-Bounce-Rate-More



Basically what Google has done is redefine the definition of spam and grouped a lot of "average" websites into the same spam category. The demotion in ranks, for some of my white hat sites, was quite severe. Unless you are a Fortune 500 company, with the financial resources to compete, you will find the deck heavily stacked against you.

I doubt your current penalty is permanent. It should expire. Don't hack up your content too much or restore it to its pre-penalty state. Otherwise when the penalty is lifted your ranks may be much worse.

Thanks for sharing your methods and results with us. Every little piece helps us to assemble the puzzle and get a clearer picture of what is going on.

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i don't really see where algorithm penalties will expire...algorithm penalties are only removed when you fix the problem...

manually penalties can expire, but NOT algorithm penalties...

How many sites were involved in your test?

Unless you were testing with 100+ sites that all had different backlinks profiles and different niches you do not have enough data to draw conclusions from (your sample size isn't big enough).

For instance if you were doing this testing on 3-4 sites, you could've done one thing, and then Google lowers your rankings because of a completely unrelated thing (considering they edit their algorithm every single day). Then you would've thought your actions caused you to go down when it was really something else. In short, correlation does not equal causation and I would be careful saying what doesn't work and what does work unless you had a very big and diverse portfolio of sites you were testing this with.

assphuck said:

As with most penalties, there really is not squat you can do until they expire. And most algorithmic penalties do expire. The last penalty I had before Penguin lasted about three months. When it expired, my ranks were well above where they were before the penalty. Now that site is in the toilet again.

A good read on Penguin is at http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2182895/Matt-Cutts-Talks-Google-Penguin-Negative-SEO-Disavowing-Links-Bounce-Rate-More



Basically what Google has done is redefine the definition of spam and grouped a lot of "average" websites into the same spam category. The demotion in ranks, for some of my white hat sites, was quite severe. Unless you are a Fortune 500 company, with the financial resources to compete, you will find the deck heavily stacked against you.

I doubt your current penalty is permanent. It should expire. Don't hack up your content too much or restore it to its pre-penalty state. Otherwise when the penalty is lifted your ranks may be much worse.

Thanks for sharing your methods and results with us. Every little piece helps us to assemble the puzzle and get a clearer picture of what is going on.

Click to expand...

If you don't change anything why would an algorithm penalty 'expire'? An algorithm is an algorithm, it plugs in all SEO related variables about your site into an equation and gets a result. If you aren't changing anything you shouldn't expect in 2-3 months that same algorithm to suddenly stop penalizing you. Algorithms don't work like that.

It's actually reverse of what you noted. Algorithmic penalties/demotions do expire/drop where manual action penalties typically require a reconsideration request be submitted to Google via Webmaster Tools.

Most algorithmic problems are naturally corrected as one continues adding content, building quality links, as old links expire and as Google refines its algorithm. Even without specifically targeting "the problem," most algorithmic penalties/demotions do expire or drop as the conditions that created them change over time. The process is not quick, but has worked well in the past on countless websites that I own. Normally within 90 days or less I have seen full recoveries of algorithmically penalized/demoted sites.

Those that use scraped content on their sites may be a different story. But I've always used original/good content on my sites and will continue doing so. The key is applying today's knowledge and successful SEO trends to what you undertake at this point forward. Abandoning websites, changing all of the content, using 301s, etc. are all a waste in my view. If this is what some believe is needed to "recover," then they will be doing this each time Google releases a major algorithm update. I've seen many algorithm updates and have bounced back from each and every one.

manny521 said:

i don't really see where algorithm penalties will expire...algorithm penalties are only removed when you fix the problem...

manually penalties can expire, but NOT algorithm penalties...

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artificial_genius said:

If you don't change anything why would an algorithm penalty 'expire'? An algorithm is an algorithm, it plugs in all SEO related variables about your site into an equation and gets a result. If you aren't changing anything you shouldn't expect in 2-3 months that same algorithm to suddenly stop penalizing you. Algorithms don't work like that.

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You assume that ranking a website consists of constant variables and it does not. Google's algorithm saw about 500+ changes last year. That averages out to over 41 modifications each month. In other words, how Google ranks your site is constantly changing. The key is to change where you get your links from, create comprehensive quality webpages that are undeniably high quality and to simply not give up because Google changed their algorithm. In 2-3 months, the data that was used to calculate where your site should rank will have changed and so will your ranks.

assphuck said:

It's actually reverse of what you noted. Algorithmic penalties/demotions do expire/drop where manual action penalties typically require a reconsideration request be submitted to Google via Webmaster Tools.

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When google was caught buying links to promote the chrome browser, manual action was taken against the site to download the chrome browser and there was a 60 or 90 day penalty. Whether google had to submit a reconsideration request to itself, I don't know, but you can take the JC Penny example too, where they received a 90 day penalty from manual action taken to demote their site.

Now, if you have had a manual action taken against your site by google and then you fix the problem before the end of the penalty period, then you can submit a reconsideration request and if you are no longer doing what google didn't like in the first place, then the penalty can be removed early. A good example of this is the overstock.com example. Overstock had a 90 day penalty, but they fixed the problem within 45 days and submitted the reconsideration request and the penalty was removed.

But, who really knows whats up now that penguin is in the mix.

How Google treats large organizations, which have media clout, greatly differs from small mom and pop organizations which do not have the media covering their every move. Although Google may publicly state that they treat everyone fairly, the Antitrust investigation in the US and elsewhere is a prime example of how Google's actions do not mirror that of their publicly stated principals.

Matt Cutts has noted that reconsideration requests are not accepted for Penguin related demotions as they are not manual actions but are instead algorithmically induced. Where Chrome, Overstock and JC Penny had manual actions taken against them for their practices, following the same recourse for Penguin affected websites will not work. A good read is here: http://searchenginewatch.com/articl...egative-SEO-Disavowing-Links-Bounce-Rate-More

manny521 said:

When google was caught buying links to promote the chrome browser, manual action was taken against the site to download the chrome browser and there was a 60 or 90 day penalty. Whether google had to submit a reconsideration request to itself, I don't know, but you can take the JC Penny example too, where they received a 90 day penalty from manual action taken to demote their site.

Now, if you have had a manual action taken against your site by google and then you fix the problem before the end of the penalty period, then you can submit a reconsideration request and if you are no longer doing what google didn't like in the first place, then the penalty can be removed early. A good example of this is the overstock.com example. Overstock had a 90 day penalty, but they fixed the problem within 45 days and submitted the reconsideration request and the penalty was removed.

But, who really knows whats up now that penguin is in the mix.

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I've seen some of the same things as the OP. What's funny is one of my local sites seems to be bouncing in and out of the top 100 and I just realized it's not the homepage ranking but my F'ing contact page...WTF? There's nothing on that page except a contact form and the business info.

I too have been trying lots of different things to try and recover a few sites hit by penguin... but with no luck. Going to give it a few months longer trying out a few things and then i'll probably just give up on the sites and focus on some new ones

What about taking content from some sites and putting it on new sites and taking down old sites. Good or bad idea? How long to wait after taking down the old site? Or how to properly do this?

I think the Whois infos are important for GG, if they tank one website they will search for same Whois websites and tank them too.

As well for sites which are using same adsense Pub ID, or same gg-analytics code... Those footprints are big.

Just a thought...

cool test, but the problem is that the Algo is in constant flux. And its only been 6 weeks. So any of your link building and strategies havent had enough time to accurately be evaluated as helpful, hurtful or no-effect.

Case in point. We had over 100 sites effected negatively and positively by Penguin. There have been many sites that have made a 80-100% recovery by doing NOTHING.

There are 3 solutions.
1. Build more sites. Go HAM.
2. Try to diversify links like this poster did.
3. Wait. Only time will tell what sites will recover and which new ones will work

Great presentation and analysis of your experiment. You have shared valuable conclusions. However my observations show that most of the sites that got penalized by Penguin had a backlink profile with the main keyword used more than 30%. So I am sure that keyword diversity and ratio plays a big role. Also sites with spammy links but which have used their main keyword under 20% of the time were not penalized.